


Problem solving

by dasakuryo



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 14:09:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9552311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dasakuryo/pseuds/dasakuryo
Summary: Neither Bodhi nor Jyn find Hoth enjoyable, particularly given the fact they feel cold all the time. Cassian may or may not have noticed, and he may or might not have taken actions on this matter. He grew up in Fest after all, he's a few ideas for this particular problem solving. //[In which Bodhi reflects on how Cassian and Jyn’s behave around each other, Jyn is annoyed at Hoth and the cold, and Cassian tries to help out. The downside, or upside, is that Cassian’s helping ends up leaving him and Jyn in situations which may be awkward to tackle given their feelings for each other. Baze and Chirrut are amused, K-2SO is bemused, Bodhi is generally frustrated(and anxious).





	

Bodhi _hated_ Hoth.

Well, perhaps hate was too strong a word, but he definitely loathed it. It wasn't that he wasn't used to cold weather –Jedha'd never been that much of a warm planet to begin with. Besides, Bodhi had been a cargo pilot; he'd spent most of his time aboard a ship making deliveries across Imperial territory. Space was cold, as a rule.

And still, he just couldn't get used this particular coldness. Hoth's cold was numbing, seemed to pierce through skin and sink into one's bones. It didn't help either that Hoth didn't even seem to have a more warmer temperature.  At all. Unlike Jedha, where the drop happened at particular times of the day, Hoth's thermal range started with can't-feel-your-extremities, all the way to step-outside-and-die.

Bodhi heard faint clanking to his left. The profile of his heavy hood obstructed his vision, but when a grunt followed Bodhi needed no further confirmation that that sound had come from nobody else but Jyn Erso. She gave the impression she loathed Hoth as much as him, if not more.

"Here," there was a dab on his arm, "drink it before it freezes over," she seemed to utter that through clenched teeth. Bodhi took the stimcaf cup from her hand cautiously, or rather clumsily. After all, hands covered in thick wollen inner-lined gloves weren't particularly helpful.

Bodhi took a sip. Over the edge of his cup saw Jyn wincing when her nose and mouth were greeted by the gentle, yet icy, zephyr coming from the entrance of the hangar. Judging by her expression, she regretted having tugged down her scarf. The snow crunched underneath her feet when she moved closer to the fusion furnace.

He swallowed his wince at the flavor together with the liquid. And so their days on Hoth pretty much went on. They would spent most of their mornings recharging energy cells; a job neither of them found particularly unpleasant —though boring, it guaranteed staying in the immediate proximity of the fusion furnace while the energy cells charged. As Jyn had so eloquently pointed out, was most than welcoming when they were stranded on a block of ice.

They hadn't been cleared for making patrolling rounds yet. Bodhi figured some people in the high command may have something to do with it. Whether they still had misgivings about certain members of the Rogue One crew or whether this was entirely on Mon Mothma, he couldn't be sure. However, Bodhi had reasons to suspect it was the latter. When Cassian, the last of them had been discharged from the medbay, the woman mentioned there were other wounds that needed to be tend to. Bodhi remembered how her voice, usually calm, collected, had dropped and taken a serious, almost severe, tone.

Bodhi remembered having seen her from his bed while on treatment. At first his immediate conclusion was that his exhausted, pain fogged mind was playing tricks on him. But after a few rounds of immersion in the bacta tank, once the raw skin of wounds and burns on his legs and side started to soften, pinkish scarred tissue replacing exposed muscles and flesh,  those assumptions had been soon dispelled. Mon Mothma did not only peer into the medbay, she stepped inside the medbay and talked with the wounded men and women.

"Bodhi Rook, the Alliance owes you," she had told him one day.

Bodhi couldn't quite recall how he had tried to argue that statement. He was pretty sure he'd stuttered through it, mentioned something about him others having done more vital things than him on Scarif. He remembered his words almost blotting each other out. And, after staring at him directly in the eye in an obvious silent unvoiced disagreement, Mothma face had softened. She hadn't smiled, but there was an edge of solemnity to her expression in the way her eyes seemed to cloud.

She had come back a few times afterwards, and Bodhi couldn't understand why a politician, a head of the Alliance, would care like she seemed to care. It must have been written all over his face, for Mon Mothma once offered casually, "a wise Kel'Dor told me once about the clones, 'they're not expendable, not to me' when many on the Senate argued they were merely gears of war and barely human at all."

And a week after that, when Cassian had been discharged and Draven showed up, Bodhi suddenly _understood_ Mothma's words.

His musings were cut short abruptly by a firm grasp on his arm, at which Bodhi nearly jolted and spilled his remaining stimcaf on the snow covered soil. It'd been Jyn, who was pulling him closer to the fusion furnace.

"You're shuddering," the woman shrugged, and promptly took the final gulp of her drink, judging by the way she slanted her cup.

Bodhi blurted out a thank you, tilting his head slightly in a brief nod. He figured Jyn was still trying to break that shell of roughness and feigned indifference she'd built around her throughout the years, like he was trying to defeat that semi-permanent state of anxiety that took over him so easily. However, in Jyn's case, it was obvious that all those innate defences had a clear breach: Cassian Andor.

Bodhi couldn't believe the fatuous nonsense of their whole going round and round in circles. It was obvious to any creature with eyes that they were all the time orbiting, gravitating, towards each other. Cassian's perpetual inscrutable vacant expression got a twinkle to his eyes each time Jyn appeared on his field of vision, sometimes there was even an obvious shadow of a smile in the softness of his mouth.  Jyn couldn't really keep herself from smiling when she noticed Cassian's gaze on her, especially when said gaze lingered that second longer.

Chirrut found the situation amusing, K-2SO didn't skip a chance to make witty, sometimes sarcastic comments. Baze generally spent his time warning his partner and grunting at the droid —not that his interventions prompted the desired effect in any of the two cases. Chirrut still made vague yet too obvious references insinuating their two team-mates liked each other; while K-2SO  had assumed the responsibility of informing Cassian the negative effects of increasing levels of phenylethylamine and norepinephrine on his nervous system and professional conduct.

"How do you even-?" Bodhi had asked out of reflex, amazed by the amount of information the droid was all the time drawing from, when K-2SO had so straightforwardly prompted the information while both of them and Cassian were working on the repairs of a cargo shuttle.

"Kay," Cassian had warned, his face contorting in a frown, "not now."

"I am following my programming," the droid had stated briskly, clearly not as an apology but rather retorting, "it was you who compiled my data-banks. My analysis have been conducted based on the body of knowledge at disposal," when the droid'd added that, his head slightly turned towards Bodhi.

Cassian, rather than answering the droid, had turned back his attention to the wire and pipes below deck. And Bodhi might have misheard, because he'd been focusing on trying to find the short circuit, but he was almost sure Cassian had muttered, "Perhaps you will be getting an update sometime soon, Kay, very soon."

K-2SO hadn't made any references to any human biological related information for a while now, so Bodhi could only reach to the conclusion that either droid and re-programmer had come to a mutual understanding, K2 was being civil for once and stopped saying whatever came into his circuits, or Cassian had effectively erased all trace of that kind of information from the droid's info-dump.

And speaking of—

"The Captain seemed most distressed about your whereabouts before he departed for patrol duty, Jyn Erso," was K-2SO greeting, "in the future, do not refrain from disclosing this information. I reminded him that it, nor you, have no utility nor strategical value of importance, but he seemed to dissent."

Well, that much for being civil, Bodhi thought, definitely there was no algorithm for subtlety in the droid's programming. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jyn's expression contorting first into a frown, then a hard glare with a set jaw, to finally lead to a snort.

"Thanks," her scoff was clearly laced with sarcasm, though Bodhi doubted the droid had picked that up, or if he did, he most certainly did not care, "charming as always, aren't you?" she added, when the droid turned around and left with heavy steps.

Bodhi cleared out the furnace from the now charged energy cells and placed discharged ones in their place, while Jyn stuffed each inside their correspondent container in the blasters. Twenty minutes, perhaps a bit more, elapsed since the droid's departure. The only sound there heard was the ruffle of clothes as the two of them moved about conducting the task, and occasional curses whispered through clenched teeth from Jyn. Bodhi felt sorry for whomever had manufactured those gloves.

"You really shouldn't—" but Jyn had already pulled one glove off her hand with her teeth.

She shrugged, and sat down next to the furnace, ungloved hand facing towards it. Bodhi frowned; not sure how exactly to remind Jyn that wasn't a sensible thing to do when they were standing in the hangar instead of a heated room.

"Be careful, you can get frostbite on there if you don't cover it," the concerned warning hadn't come from him, though.

It'd come from Cassian. Bodhi gaze darted to Jyn's face, who in spite of trying to appear indifferent quirking an eyebrow at him had clearly had a change in her mood from annoyed to slightly displeased. Cassian held her gaze, staring, and quirked both eyebrows. Jyn clicked her tongue, grabbed the glove and put it back on, "happy now, captain?" she asked, shrugging and lifting her chin up.

Bodhi had to swallow down his snort, lowered his gaze to check the cells' charge. He heard a snap, followed immediately by a clank. A quick glance to his left, Cassian's googles were on the cargo container, right next to the blaster Jyn'd been working on.

"If by happy you mean glad a Sargeant won't lose her fingers," rung Cassian's voice, and despite its flatness his voice sounded a lot like a chuckle, "then yes."

Silence. Tension lingering in the air, but a weird one, not the kind of tension that would make your pulse pound in your ears, but rather the one that made you want to scrape your neck and cough awkwardly in a vain effort to break the sudden uncomfortable atmosphere. The kind of tension that made Bodhi feel he was intruding, peering into something intimate —even if he couldn't quite define what this something going on between his friends was exactly.

He crouched down to inspect the furnace, or rather, to take a step further away from whatever was going on, before giving in to the impulse and said something he could regret later —he lacked Chirrut's eloquence for that kind of teasing knowing subtleties.

When he set down the charged energy cells atop the cargo container, it should have come as no surprise to him that now Jyn had a second pair of hands helping to the task.

Watching them, he was tempted, so tempted to try make his way out their reduced working space and, casually, trip and shove them closer together. They had been stealing glances at each other while they set the energy cells in place —Jyn's gaze will make short, quick glances out of the corner of her eye, while Cassian would gaze, eyes actually fixating on her longer, every time she was too busy battling with the cells and her gloves, attention diverted. Jyn would bit her lips when Cassian wasn't looking; small curving creases would appear right next to the corners of Cassian's mouth when Jyn wasn't looking.

Bodhi wondered if any of the two had realised they were now standing closer than when they started assembling the weaponry and its charges back together, they were so close, that each time any of them would move there was the faint raspy sound of the heavy jacket cloth, like a whisper. Almost touching, almost resting against each other.

All of a sudden, and for a fleeting moment, Bodhi understood K-2SO urge to say whatever came into his circuits. He sighed, and kept monitoring the charging process. It was going to be a long, long morning.

 

  

"Finally," Jyn grunted, lumping the last blaster into the open cargo container, "I don't want to see another DC-15A in my life."

"I knew someone who wouldn't have approved that statement," Bodhi heard Cassian muttering, seemingly more to himself and slightly amused by Jyn's annoyance, judging by the way the usual flatness in his voice had subdued.

Jyn raised her eyebrows, "Rex. Taught me some things about explosives when I started," he added, imperturbably, but did not elaborate any further after pausing to take a sip of his stimcaf. Bodhi wasn't that surprised, after all, Cassian was not known for over-sharing, specially personal matters, and especially anything regarding his past. Bodhi would have liked to ask if this Rex was part of the Rebellion, but suddenly took in that it might have been someone Cassian knew from his childhood on Fest -someone who, if he'd joined the Alliance- may most likely be dead.

"You two might have get on well," Cassian provided, turning towards him, "you know, imperial defector and all."

"You think so?" Bodhi asked, his voice ringed more acute than usual, laced with something that felt too much glee nestled in his chest.

"Yeah. And now that I think about it, Jyn too, probably. He and his squadron went rogue against one of their Republic Generals."

Bodhi didn't understood why Jyn's eyes had suddenly grown wide, "against a Jedi?" she asked, almost in a thin voice.

Cassian nodded, and Bodhi was still confused, not fully grasping the meaning behind Jyn's amazement. Had he been born earlier, he might have got some vague recollection of the Jedi, but the Empire was already in power and the Jedi erased from HoloNet records... and virtually from the whole galaxy.  He'd heard the rumours, of course, which he'd caught either in passing or eaves-dropping -even after Scarif, the hushed "Imp" and whispered insults still followed him around the base, particularly when he was alone or with Jyn. Some members of the Alliance were believed to be Jedi, and there were even those who assured that at some point there was someone on the High Council that had been a Jedi.

"Suddenly rebelling against the Council doesn't sound as impressive," he heard Jyn murmur.

Neither of them spoke much afterwards, each one busy with their respective stimcafs. Bodhi was starting to wonder whether or not he should go for caf instead, not only because the strong, sometimes so thick it was almost gloppy, was even harder to gulp down, but because he still remembered that insanely acute headache that felt as if his skull was being pierced through. And, as K-2SO had so diligently provided even when Bodhi said "no, thank you"; caffeine increased alertness and was highly probable that sentient beings with a proclivity to anxiety would not find the beverage that beneficial.

There was a sudden splash, when Bodhi's gaze turned towards where the sound had come from, he found Jyn glaring at the cup on the frozen soil.

"I hate this gloves," she grunted, jaw set, "I hate not feeling my hands," she let out a tired sigh, "And I hate being cold, all the time," that last part was almost a whisper, the stress on the last words wrapping around an annoyed groan.

"Maybe we can ask if there's any droid that needs a re-charge," Bodhi conjectured, when he saw her gaze diverting where they'd been working not even half a standard hour earlier.

"I will see what I can do about it," Cassian said, "for both of you."

Bodhi hadn't realised he'd been shuddering.

 

* * *

 

"You've lost your mind," Jyn's annoyance was somehow muffled down by the scarf that was tightly wrapped and covering half of her face. Her narrowed eyes glaring at the pair of googles, she took a step back and half her weight rested on her toes. Anyone witnessing the scene from afar could've thought Cassian was handing her an activated fragmentation grenade instead.

The three tauntauns seemed to eye her, curiously. She saw Bodhi wincing, when one of them got closer, face contorted probably at their strong smell. She caught a glimpse of him patting the creature's neck, despite the circumstances.

"Weren't you cold?"

"And going outside will fix that how?" she fought back in a snort, almost mockingly, "look, I understand you grew up in an ice planet but-"

"Riding the tauntauns will increase your body temperature once the thermal equilibrium with that of Hoth is broken," K-2SO interjected out of the blue, as per usual, "the Captain's right. You will stop feeling cold, Jyn Erso."

Jyn was sure that the subsequent glare she shot at the droid, its inherent message she wasn't of the same opinion, was completely ignored by the droid. The tauntauns bleated, one of them bumped Cassian on the shoulder with its head, he reached out with the hand he wasn't holding the reins with, scratching its neck.

Jyn's eyes went to the tauntauns to the googles a few times, before she looked at him. Her face had been numb the whole morning, and even more now from standing even closer to the gate, at the mercy of the icy cold gushes of wind, so she wasn't precisely sure whether she was still frowning. Maybe it was the sun reflecting on the ice and snow surrounding them, but she was pretty sure there was a twinkle to Cassian's dark eyes.

"Don't you trust me?"

That _sleemo—_

She snatched the googles, lifted her chin and pretended she'd not seen the smile curling Cassian's lips. Walking towards the remaining tauntaun, she took the hood down and managed to slide the rubber band in place even with her gloved hands, she re-arranged the hood and scarf afterwards as best as she could. She hopped on the creature, which bleated when she set her feet on the stirrups. She swallowed down the grunt, the upright slightly bended position could have been more uncomfortable provided the seat and the cantle hadn't been paddled and cushioned. Still, the muscles of the base of her spine knotted, strained from the wounds and efforts at Scarif -or perhaps it was the cold.

 

  

The wind felt like million tiny razor blades piercing and gashing her exposed skin. The animal quickened its pace from a stroll to a light throttle, following Cassian's, who had already spurred his mount to go faster. Jyn's legs hugged the sides of the animal tighter. With each slight bump as the animal seemed to stroll across the white endless landscape, she was starting to regret even more having agreed to all this.

Jyn turned her head around. The cave was nothing but silhouette by now, barely visible through the blizzard blurriness. She could see her breath, spiraling upwards in swirls of greyish mist. She narrowed her eyes, spurred her tauntaun, Cassian and Bodhi had stopped a few meters ahead of her.

"You good?" Cassian asked, his voice muffled by the thick scarf covering his mouth, barely audible, "How you holding up?" he asked, brushing the snow off his tauntaun neck.

"This isn't working," Jyn argued, her voice did come out in a frustrated grunt, "we should get back to the base, what about the wampas?" she added, eyes cautiously scanning the vast almost blinding whiteness that surrounded them.

She heard Cassian murmur something, something in Festian, she might have misinterpreted it, his voice seemed to have a tinge of amusement. When he looked up, the creases on his cheekbones were all too obvious for her to miss them. Great.

"We can't go back, not yet anyway," he said, "you're still cold, aren't you? Bodhi?" 

"You sure K-2SO doesn't need a system check-up?" was Bodhi's answer. Jyn would have laughed if it didn't mean a potential, scratch that, highly likely, sore throat the next morning. 

"Why did we stop anyway?" Jyn asked, fighting down the urge to press the heel of her feet on the tauntaun side. 

"Explain the rules," Cassian said in that flat voice of his. 

"Rules of what?" both Bodhi and her asked at the same time.

"Tag," Cassian answered, pulling down his scarf enough to uncover his mouth, "unless you already know how to play?" he pulled one of the reins backwards, towards his chest, making the animal slowly recede. He'd definitely smiled, and if Jyn's train of thought was going were Cassian was going, he'd better get away before she could smack him in the head-

And judging by the way the snow crunched below the tauntaun feet, Jyn was starting to get the feeling she was right. Before her or Bodhi could move a muscle, Cassian had spurred his tauntaun, clouted an unaware Bodhi on the forearm, who startled and nearly fell off, putting several meters between them and himself.

"You've got to tag Jyn, Bodhi, you're it!" Jyn heard him scream over the howling wind.

Her hunch hadn't been mistaken, after all. Cassian was so going to regret this.

**Author's Note:**

> I figured having the point of view of an outsider on Jyn and Cassian behaviour around each other would be interesting, though I must admit it was a challenge to write (particularly because I love Bodhi so much). I included references to The Clone Wars and Rebels, Mon Mothma knowing one of the most sensitive Masters of the Jedi Order like Plo Koon seemed fitting -considering her relationship with Padmé Amidala, and her and Koon's view on the clone troopers and the war. 
> 
> Oh, I haven't forgotten about the complete tag game scene, don't you worry. After all, these three chasing each other in the snow is too adorable and cute of a prospect, and it prompts a lot of potential slightly awkward situation for Jyn and Cassian to be in ;) -yes, I am kind of giving a sneak peek of the upcoming chapter, have you noticed? ~~Being cold isn't the only problem which needs fixing, am I right? lol~~
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading :) Feedback is always appreciated!


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